1. Field of the Invention
This invention generally relates to work order and trouble ticket management systems and, more particularly, to processes and systems that manage and that broker work orders and trouble tickets from initial creation to final closure.
2. Description of the Related Art
Most residential and business telephone customers are connected to telephone/communication systems by copper cables and wires. These copper cables are the familiar one or more telephone lines running throughout nearly every home in the United States. Because copper cable and wire connects each home, and many businesses, to the communication system, the Public Switched Telephone Network is composed of billions of copper cables and wires. Each of these copper cables must be maintained to provide superior service to the customer.
Yet maintaining these copper cables and wires is an extraordinary task. The Public Switched Telephone Network, with its millions of copper cables and wires, may receive hundreds of maintenance calls per day. These maintenance calls, in turn, may result in hundreds of maintenance trouble tickets. These hundreds of daily maintenance calls, and the resultant trouble tickets, must be efficiently managed to prevent maintenance costs from eroding profits. These resultant trouble tickets must also be efficiently managed to ensure customers receive a quick response and a quick resolution to their communication problems.
While efficiency and service are the goals, communication service providers struggle with trouble management systems that are decades-old. Most service providers are continually resuscitating legacy computer equipment and computer code. The computer equipment is often so old that spare parts are no longer available. The computer code of these early systems is also outdated, requiring specialized knowledge of older code to keep the system maintained. These legacy management systems are, thus, challenging and expensive to maintain and to preserve.
The legacy management systems are also inefficient, slow, and inaccurate. The legacy Loop Maintenance Operating System, for example, maintains an extremely large database of over twenty four million (+24,000,000) line records. As more and more customers request additional telephone lines, digital subscriber lines, and other plain, old telephone system enhancements, this extremely large database of line records must accordingly grow. Such an extremely large database system inefficiently retrieves line records and is slow to provide such data. Such a large legacy database also means the data is often corrupt. Service providers are simply unable to dynamically update the database as the line records change. Moreover, efficient management techniques, such as correlation and screening of trouble tickets, is hampered by the corrupt data. These old, legacy management systems, therefore, reduce the ability of service providers to meet the growing demands in today's competitive environment.
There is, accordingly, a need in the art for management systems that are less expensive to use and to maintain, that reduce the need for large database infrastructures, that meet or exceed current performance levels, that are more reliable configurations, that improve the use of correlation, screening, and other efficient management techniques, and that reduce the costs of maintaining operations.